In a rare split, Huntington Beach City Council members are at odds over whether they should cancel requests for a rebranding contract after multiple elected officials highlighted concerns with a “sloppy” process they say bypassed some of the city’s own procurement rules.
Those concerns led to a broader discussion on if the council has to follow the city’s rules to look for multiple bidders on contracts or handpick their chosen vendor – even as council members chose to move forward with picking a rebranding firm behind closed doors before finalizing the contract with a public vote.
Mayor Casey McKeon argued the city council has the power to handpick contractors without looking for multiple bidders.
“The council can enter into contracts, the council can bring forward contracts, they can reach out to private firms to bring forward contracts,” McKeon said at the council’s Tuesday meeting. “Those contracts will then come before council in a public setting and be voted on.”
Councilmen Chad Williams and Andrew Gruel claimed that process violates the city’s own rules, arguing that contracts shouldn’t be rushed because it leads to numerous problems and complaints from the public.
“This process is sloppy. It’s led to a rumor mill that something nefarious was done,” Gruel said. “If we have a fuzzy lane we’re traveling down we should probably not continue.”
How Did the City Decide They Needed a Rebrand?
The contract at the heart of council members’ debate is a proposed $720,000 rebranding deal with Wolffhaus, a media production company in Huntington Beach that’s run by Tyler Wolff, who’s engaged to McKeon’s appointee to the city’s Community and Library Services Commission.
[Read: Huntington Beach Leaders Split Over Rebranding Consultant]
Last year, Wolff approached then Mayor Pat Burns about filming in the city’s SWAT facility for a project he was working on, which Burns helped facilitate.
“He wanted to film in one of the local buildings with SWAT, our SWAT team, so I facilitated that connection,” Burns said. “They filmed it, it worked out great, and he started asking me about doing more of it, utilizing it and getting things for us that would be beneficial to the city and filming.”
Burns said he was too busy as mayor to handle that, so he handed the project off to McKeon, who was eventually appointed mayor and introduced Wolff to the city manager and other city executives.
McKeon said that Wolff pitched doing an audit after he tried to set up his film business in town and kept running into problems, calling Wolff “one of the best in the industry” and defending the process.
“Staff doesn’t always go and look for these things to fix. If they knew how to fix these things and knew they needed to be fixed we wouldn’t be in this situation,” McKeon said. “He (Wolff) happens to be one of the best in the industry.”
Wolff was given $30,000 by the city to conduct an audit of the city’s branding, saying he found millions of dollars in waste with the city not trademarking its brand or having a film commission.
After that audit, city staff wrote up a $720,000 contract with Wolff to fix a number of the issues identified in the audit.
That contract ultimately did not move forward after public complaints earlier this month.
Now, there are over 50 bidders, including Wolff, looking to help fix the city’s branding issues and set up things like a film commission.
Who Will Pick the Final Contractor?
While city staff are now reviewing the proposals submitted by various contractors, council members also voted to appoint Burns and Councilmen Butch Twining and Don Kennedy to a closed door subcommittee to review the proposals and pick a contractor for a vote by the entire city council.
At the end of the process, if staff members have different opinions from city leaders, both ideas will be presented to the public for a final pick according to McKeon, who asked for the closed door committee and voted with the subcommittee members to help create it.
Kennedy said it was a chance to fix some of the problems with the city’s current system, which he said “is faulted, is weak, is broken.”
“I guarantee I can get in there and find a bunch of holes in the process, make it better for the residents,” Kennedy said.
Williams and Gruel were joined by Councilwoman Gracey Van Der Mark voting against that proposal, saying that they should let staff do their job to review it without council interference and that their focus on speed was leading to mistakes.
“I don’t believe there’s anything nefarious going on,” Van Der Mark said. “I’m not comfortable with any of this. I think it’s too broad, too rushed, too messy, too many mistakes.”
Concerns Around the Final Pick
Williams said the process was “tainted” by McKeon’s clear support of Wolff, pointing out the city gave him a contract already when he didn’t have a business license yet and bringing up concerns about several features of the contract.
One of those was a clause that would pay Wolff at least $345,000 if the contract was either canceled prematurely or the city didn’t give him the necessary tools fast enough, guaranteeing he’d receive around half the remaining value of the contract whenever it gets canceled.
“After month one, he’s receiving a windfall of $345,000 for work that he ultimately does not produce,” Williams said. “I absolutely think there’s something nefarious going on with this.”
McKeon said that different contracts will have different deal points, adding they have to move fast if they want to get a new plan in place before the Fourth of July, highlighting how they could make more money off of the country’s 250th anniversary.
“If we can implement that and capture that America 250 season … that’ll launch our city to the next level,” McKeon said.
Williams pointed out that the request for proposals made no mention of a Fourth of July project being part of the scope of work, which other council members largely brushed aside.
“If companies were coming to us with no vision on how something that big, ‘I don’t even think about that’ they’d be out just by virtue of their inability to even have that kind of foresight,” Kennedy said.
It remains unclear when the final contract will come back to city council members.
If it returns by May 5, the council’s next regularly scheduled meeting, the contractor would have just under two months before the Fourth of July to plan.
Williams also questioned how Wolffhaus could have an advantage after preparing the audit and then explaining how to fix it.
“That’s an unfair advantage,” Williams said. “He got paid $30,000 to put together his audit that’s now being used for the bid. How is that fair to other bidders?”
McKeon argued the contract was an “investment” that would set the city up long term to bring in more money and help offset the city’s annual budget deficits.
“We need fresh ideas to bring in revenue,” McKeon said. “If you guys don’t like this proposal, I’d counter to you, what proposal do you have?”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.